Building with uncertain ethics

Abstract

A reflective focus on ethics can help built environment practitioners to clarify objectives and priorities, guide decision-making, and help to evaluate outcomes during confusion of personal opinion, and hidden agendas. Virtue ethics, associated particularly with Aristotle, focuses on the character of the agent rather than on the nature or consequences of a particular action. The teleological ethics is an approach that judges the morality of an action based on its outcomes or consequences. Several professional literatures on ethics in architecture address interpersonal ethics, architects' responsibilities to each other, their clients, building users, and the wider community. It covers issues as employment, contracts, a duty of care to safeguard and promote physical and psychological well-being, and to support cultures by appropriate designs, and points variously to deontological ethics and virtue ethics. Pragmatism and responsive cohesion both emphasize specific circumstances and contingencies.